#MarketersTalks: Perseguir la innovación en el marketing digital - Entrevista con Neal Schaffer

Neal Schaffer is one of the most influential marketers in the digital world and the author of a few books on social media marketing. We asked him how to stay innovative in the ever-changing world and how to work with influencer marketing.

He also shared some tips on how to re-engineer TikTok marketing and gave beautiful advice to junior marketers.

Neal Schaffer es una autoridad líder en ayudar a las empresas a través de su transformación digital de ventas y marketing through consulting, training, and helping companies of all sizes with social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing, and social selling initiatives.

He is the president of the social media agency PDCA Social, and also teaches digital media to executives.

1. ¿Cómo comenzó su andadura en el marketing digital?

I started my journey with social media marketing. Before that, I had a professional career in B2B sales and business development.

However, as a country manager or regional vice president of sales in a start-up environment, I often needed to wear many different hats, including, in many cases, the marketing hat.

I learned a lot about marketing on the job. Shifting my career to social media, I began to transfer that business knowledge more and more to marketing. It started with digital/social and Linkedin because of my B2B background.

Also, at the time, it was the only social network for professionals. I started with teaching companies how to leverage Linked in B2B sales, but also sales for media marketing. 

Like today, marketing was the biggest driver for social media back then. There was much more demand for social media marketing than social sales or social selling. But, over time, I wanted to avoid becoming a one-trick pony.

So, even though I published two books on LinkedIn, I realized that my clients didn’t need just LinkedIn. They needed support in all social media. And that’s when I invested in learning and experimenting and creating my own brand across every social media channel that made sense. 

Eso culminó con mi publicación de Maximize Social en 2013, que trata sobre la creación de una estrategia integral de marketing en redes sociales. Después, en marzo de 2020, publiqué mi cuarto libro, The Age of Influence, sobre la influencia en el marketing. Esto me llevó al marketing digital. 

I like to say I am a social media market turned digital marketer because when I published my book, it was impossible to physically meet people. So I had to find ways to digitally market my book, and social media was only one piece of the puzzle.

There is also search and email, and that’s where I’ve spent a lot of time over the last two years. I built up my blog to focus on the stuff many digital marketing experts are a little jaded by – search engine optimization, email marketing, and automatización del marketing.

But with my social media marketing background, I see them in a new light. I’m trying to breathe new life and new perspective into these areas. 

2. ¿Hay alguna herramienta imprescindible en su caja de herramientas de marketing? 

Si tuviera que nombrar algunas herramientas imprescindibles, empezaría por los cuadros de mando de redes sociales Agora Pulse y SocialBee. Los utilizo para publicar distintos contenidos en diferentes redes, y ambos me funcionan bien. 

También utilizo Inoreader, que me ayuda a crear cubos personalizados de fuentes RSS. Luego puedo importar estos canales a una herramienta de redes sociales y utilizarla como mi panel de creación de contenidos. Esto también me ayuda a estar al día de las últimas novedades en medios digitales y sociales. 

Otro panel de redes sociales que añadiría a la mezcla es Tailwind, que es muy específico para Pinterest. 

Other must-have SEO tools that I use are Semrush and, obviously, Google Analytics. And while I don’t use much AI for writing, I use Frase.io for SEO analysis. When I need an AI tool for simple content ideas, I use Jasper.

My favorite email marketing tool is ConvertKit, but I know a lot of clients prefer active campaigns. Whenever I need help with anything I am not an expert in, I usually find and hire experts on Upwork. 

3. ¿Cuál es el mejor caso práctico de marketing digital que ha visto? 4. ¿Qué es lo primero que te viene a la mente cuando piensas en el mejor? 

Bueno, he escrito algunas entradas en el blog sobre casos prácticos de marketing digital, y muchas estudios de casos de marketing are in my own book. And the first thing that comes to my mind is number one: what was the actual business impact of the case study?

Not how many likes and impressions they get but how they impact their business. How much more sales did they generate? And, compared to other channels, how much more effective was it?

And then, overall, did this double their sales? Did it add to a one percent increase in sales? These are the first things that come to mind when I think about the best digital marketing case study.

No matter what case study that is. I’ve seen too many good ones, but those are the things I look for. 

4. ¿Qué pueden hacer las marcas para intensificar sus esfuerzos de marcado?

Hay muchas cosas que las marcas pueden hacer, pero creo que el marketing de influencers es una clave enorme que les permite relacionarse y comprometerse más profundamente con los creadores de contenidos que tienen una cuota de voz cada vez más alta en las redes sociales, donde cada vez es más difícil para las marcas competir por diversas razones. 

5. ¿Cómo mantenerse innovador en el marketing digital?

Siempre hay que consumir contenidos en los canales de marketing digital más populares. Y esto significa un montón de contenido de formato corto: YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, vídeos Tiktok... todos son muy diferentes. 

La mejor manera de seguir siendo innovador es consumir, analizar, aplicar ingeniería inversa y, al final, crear tus propios contenidos, o colaborar con personas influyentes para que creen esos contenidos por ti. 

Hay que estar a la altura de los tiempos e inspirarse para innovar. Al menos, esa ha sido mi experiencia. 

6. ¿Qué opina del contenido escrito con IA en términos de SEO y de las últimas actualizaciones de Google Search? ¿Crees que este sector crecerá o estará mal visto?

Veámoslos por separado. 

Google Helpful Content update. Clearly, Google is sending the message that not only should your content be helpful, but it should be relevant to your niche.

That’s what I read out of that. So it’s easy to use AI tools to quickly generate decent copy about anything you want.

But if your blog is about social media and you suddenly you start posting about cryptocurrency, you won’t rank as high as similar posts from a website that just talks about cryptocurrency because that’s what they’re experts in. 

Obviously, Google also said things like “add personal experiences” and what have you. But every time Google updates, it just sends the same message differently: post relevant content that looks like it was written by humans. So I don’t think that there’s anything new.

They’re just responding and constantly tweaking their algorithms. I definitely saw an increase in my traffic, and I am a user of AI tools. 

Así que veamos la otra cuestión, las herramientas de IA frente a los contenidos escritos con IA. 

AI algorithms determine what we see in social media news feeds. AI is already being used in the technology around us. I don’t think AI is necessarily evil.

With the emergence of DALL·E 2, AI-powered visual content generation is a compelling use case. In a few seconds, marketers can create an image that looks better than any stock photo.

If you’re looking for stock photos for your blog posts or PowerPoint presentations, it will save you a lot of time, so I am all for that, and I plan to do more with that as well. 

También utilizo herramientas de IA para el análisis de contenidos, que resultan muy útiles y ahorran mucho tiempo. 

Cuando se trata de contenido escrito. Ya disponíamos de herramientas como la paráfrasis, que permite tomar una frase y escupir algo único, con el mismo significado pero diferente. La tecnología siempre ha estado ahí. Creo que la inteligencia artificial está evolucionando y que, desde el punto de vista de la creación de contenidos, debe considerarse una ayuda. 

I think that AI for content creation is most effective when you’re looking for various ad copy when you want 20 variations of the same thing. AI can come in handy and generate those for you and give you lots of ideas.

For example, if you’re stuck writing a paragraph and need some fresh ideas, you can get inspired with AI-generated copy. This can guide you on what to write or not write about. AI-generated content has a lot more value for shorter texts, like ad copy, SEO titles, and descriptions.

But the longer content you need, the less value it has. 

At the end of the day, it may not be compelling compared to human written content, although that gap is shortening. So the net-net is that AI-written content has a place, but I look at AI more as a helper than as a tool that will write all the content for me.

If every time you write content, it’s just a summary of what’s available on the internet, then AI can write that for you. But that type of content will be harder and harder to rank.

And it will be harder and harder to get people to actually read it and want to take action after reading it. So it’s not going to serve your best interest.

7. ¿Cómo aconsejarías aprovechar el marketing de influencers en los tiempos actuales?

Defino marketing de influencers como aprovechar a las personas que tienen influencia. Si tu cuenta de Twitter tiene 500 seguidores y alguien tiene 1000, esa persona tiene más influencia que tú.

I also look at influencers in terms of brand affinity. Who are people that have some influence in social media that like and/or trust your brand?

It begins with your employees, customers, and people who follow you on social media. They’re not customers yet, but they have an affinity for you. They know you. They have engaged with you. And then, obviously, come partners, distributors, resellers, et cetera. I’d always start with those that already know you.

And when you start with your customers and create programas de sociosEso es marketing de influencers. El marketing de afiliación es marketing de influencia. Aprovechas a los afiliados porque tienen influencia. 

So when you look at influencer marketing holistically like I do, it’s not about fake Instagram followers. It’s about companies deciding who they want to engage with as influencers. And they should always start by asking:

“Are you a user of our product?” And if they’re not, you want to send them the product first and ask them: “What did you think about the product?” 

The influencer marketing industry has had a bad vibe for a while, but it wasn’t caused by the influencers. The influencers were incentivized to buy fake followers because the brands were only interested in vanity metrics.

But this is pre-COVID influencer marketing. This was before I wrote La era de la influencia on influencer marketing. It has changed significantly since then, and people can see through phony advertisements quickly.

But on the other hand, when I look at my Gen Z kids and millennials, they don’t mind sponsored content from influencers if it adds value to them. So it’s something to think about. 

8. ¿Tienes algún truco o hackeo sobre cómo recordar o hacer ingeniería inversa, como has dicho, de buenos contenidos de YouTube Shorts, TikTok u otros canales?

I presented at Content Marketing World on how to reverse-engineer your competitors’ social media content strategy. And I’d say, with general social media – how do people work?

They have content calendars and content categories, and they usually publish content according to these categories. I think it is not easy to do with LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

But you get in the process of tagging the objective of each piece of content, and obviously, what the content is about and then organizing those tags, looking at engagement, looking at frequency, you can begin to look at your competitors’ social media content strategy.

This is effective if you’re new to the industry, think you’re falling behind, or just want to reset your social media content strategy. And that’s based on my clients who wanted to do a reset on their social media content strategies. It was perfect for them.

Para las plataformas más creativas como YouTube Shorts, TikTok, ni siquiera voy a hablar de Instagram Reels porque eso ha ido en una dirección muy diferente. TikTok es la más atractiva porque es la más difícil para las marcas y las personas entender cómo crear contenido si no lo consumes cinco horas al día como hacen mis hijos. 

¿Por qué es diferente con YouTube Corto? Bueno, dentro de YouTube Corto, puedes crear un corto a partir de un vídeo de YouTube, ¿verdad? Puedes coger un fragmento de un vídeo de YouTube y crear un corto a partir de él. Así que de nuevo, es muy diferente de TikTok, que es 100% creativo. 

I’m currently reverse-engineering TikTok to create my own strategy, and I’m a little late to the game. But still, you’re never late to do social media, and older people are consuming more TikTok.

In addition, there’s more informational content and more B2B content.

So it’s an excellent time to get started. Just like Instagram has become more B2B over time as well. Or rather, it’s okay to publish more B2B content there than it would have been 10 years ago. 

With Tik Tok, it really understands that it’s, first of all, based on memes. A lot of popular videos are based on trending audio. It used to be based on trending dances, and I think now it’s turned to trending audio, where a lot of people are given their own spin on audio, and I’m not talking about music.

I’m talking about people talking, like “Help me! Help me!” and then seeing how all these different people create content around that. 

Te darás cuenta de que es una combinación de varias cosas. Tienes cabezas parlantes, vídeos en los que la gente está en silencio, mirando a la cámara o alejándose de ella, y diferentes tipos de texto superpuesto. 

I’m currently doing this reverse engineering in the category of blogging. What’s really cool about TikTok is you don’t need to enter a hashtag. You enter a keyword, and it just introduces your video after video after video.

So if you had an hour to spend, input a keyword and take a look at the first 10 or 20 videos that pop up. You can look at their descriptions and their hashtags.

But more importantly, looking at the visual ways in which that content was created, you’ll begin to see patterns.

As I said, TikTok is a meme culture based on a lot of patronized content. And what are the most frequent patterns? What makes sense for you to create content on?

And that would be my starting point. After that, you want to do different formats. You want to collect data and see how it drives business, and so on. But that is a good starting point. 

9. Nos ha contado su receta para seguir siendo innovador, pero ¿cómo encontrar el momento y el lugar en un entorno tan acelerado? ¿Cuáles son sus sugerencias sobre cuándo encontrar tiempo para mejorar?

Tiendo a no reservar ninguna reunión los viernes, que son mis días de I+D. Gary Vaynerchuk fue el primero en defenderlo, pero muchos otros también han mencionado esta regla del 80-20: haz que el 20% de tu tiempo sea tiempo de I+D. 

Así tienes tiempo para experimentar con distintas plataformas y consumir nuevos contenidos. Hago todo lo posible para que los viernes sean ese momento. Si vas a mi calendario, estos viernes están llenos de aquí a siempre. Esa es una forma de hacerlo. Si eso no es suficiente, tienes que ir a tu calendario y bloquear tiempo. Y esa es otra forma eficaz de hacerlo. 

Pero no hay una receta secreta. Se necesita tiempo para seguir siendo innovador, y ese tiempo hay que invertirlo en ello. 

10. ¿Tiene algún plan interesante que compartir con nosotros? ¿Va a publicar pronto algún libro?

Bueno, ahora mismo estoy en proceso de crear mi primera clase de aprendizaje basado en cohortes. Será sobre el tema del marketing de influencers. 

Enseño marketing de influencers en UCLA Extension, lo que me permitirá ofrecer las enseñanzas que hago a nivel universitario a todo el mundo. Así que estoy muy entusiasmado con el lanzamiento de eso. 

También estoy escribiendo mi quinto libro, que será un manual de marketing digital para la economía post-COVID. Y estoy tomando una nueva mirada a los viejos temas de marketing digital como SEO, marketing por correo electrónico, automatización de marketing, pero también incluyendo mis nuevos consejos sobre marketing en redes sociales, marketing de influencers y marketing de contenidos.

También tengo previsto hacer más cosas con mi canal de YouTube. El vídeo va a ser un foco estratégico. Y YouTube es donde planeo empezar sobre Tiktok, por muchas razones diferentes. Podemos hablar de eso por separado.

11. ¿Tiene algún consejo para los vendedores principiantes? 

La única forma de aprender es haciendo.

I spent the first 15 years of my career in Japan. There’s a term called shokunin, which is a culture of craftsmanship. It represents not only Japanese culture but many Japanese creators and business people that I know – you’re always crafting your skill and sharpening your knife. The only way to do that is to get experience.

And if you don’t have that experience, create it with your personal brand (like I did) or as an intern, or contact a local nonprofit and ask if they need help. Most of them probably do.

So you get experience and confidence you learn when you start to manage multiple brands because then you see trends, and you have more data to work with. 

It’s like my daughter, who is still a high schooler. She interned for a company and was doing influencer marketing for them as a high schooler. Every influencer with over 10,000 followers on Instagram wanted to be paid.

But everybody under 10,000 followers agreed to do the influencer campaign just for a free product without asking for additional money. This is valuable insight. Now, when she does influencer marketing for another company, she can start assuming that she will not pay anyone under 10,000 followers. And she can negotiate that with anyone with fewer than 10,000 followers.

Gifts should be sufficient, and if that doesn’t interest you, she’ll find other influencers who would be interested in it because she knows that it works. 

Con los datos llegan los conocimientos, con los datos llega la confianza, con los datos llega el crecimiento. Así que hay que generar esos datos.